1. Goebbels diaries of the years 1942-43, Zürich, Atlantis 1948, 528 p., edited by Louis P. LochnerAccording to Louis P. Lochner the 591 typewrited original pages have been found 1945 immediately after the end of the war by a rag collector in the court of the propaganda-ministry at Wilhelmsplatz and have been brought to a wastepaperdealer. Through the hands of different intermediaries the papers finally ended up in Lochner's hands, who identified them as the original diary-entries of Dr. Goebbels und published them. (DER SPIEGEL No. 04/1951 + Fraenkel/Manvell Goebbels - a biography). Those pages of the diary include the passage of 27.03.1942.

2. Goebbels, Joseph: The Diaries, The complete fragments, edited by Elke Fröhlich on behalf of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte and in cooperation with the German Federal Archives, Saur 1987This edition of the complete Goebbels Diaries is based on Lochner's finding and the rest of the original diary pages, which have been searched for and found on the instruction of the [communist] GDR-government in the former Reichskanzlei [this building was blown up and torn down by the Sovjets from February 1949 on - but Irving writes in the introduction to his book The unknown Dr. Goebbels - The secret diaries 1938 that the communist GDR-government in 1969 conducted a investigation which they should have done decades ago: In this year 1969 they searched the ruins of Hitler's Reichskanzlei and found nine aluminium-boxes containing typewrited as well as handwritten Goebbels-diaries in miserable condition [p.9] How is that possible? The building had been destroyed 20 years ago by the Sovjets - the Führerbunker was not destoyed then, but it has been closely examined by the Sovjets and the other Allies (e.g. Trevor-Roper, then a MI6-officer) in order to find out what has happened to Hitler - they would certainly not have left behind nine aluminium-boxes with Goebbels' diaries, I'm quite sure]David Irving's discovery of the original Agfa Autolith Microfiche-glass-copies of the diaries in 1992, which have been made on Goebbels' instructions before the war ended and which are in the possession of the former secret Sovjet State Archives in Moscow, obviously confirms the authenticity of the Lochner findig, which is now at the Hoover Institution library in Stanford, California, as well as that of those diaries which have been found by the former [communist] GDR-government.

Those websites seem to be offline.
The links refer to the introduction of Irving's up.cit. book The unknown Dr. Goebbels - The secret diaries 1938, where he describes in great detail the story of the diaries and his role in it.
Perhaps somebody has the English edition of this book in his book-shelves and can post the relevant passages here?

I think it's important not to lose sight of the concern that the diary, as we have it, may contain a number of interpolated inauthentic passages. It would an extremely big step to assume that anyone thinks that the diaries are a fabrication lock, stock and barrel. I think fraud on that scale would have been discovered by now. Rather, the fact that the bulk of the diaries is authentic is important because it lends credibility to at least a half dozen passages which many people doubt were genuinely penned by Goebbels, and for good reason.

Some of the content of a post about Irving´s letter, the last post on page 2, has correctly been deleted, but in the present form the post appears somewhat confused.

The problem when commenting on this letter is that Irving mentions an article by some Mr. Goodson, which I haven´t read, and the letter is written 1997, apparently four years before the publication of the Weckert article.

But it does deal with the Kristallnacht, and Weckert is mentioned. The question is whether Irving at this point is aware of the kind of proofs that Weckert presents in the article that, as it seems, was published 2001. If that´s the case, the only correct response would be:

a) Okay, it seems these entries actually have been forged....

or:

b) No, Weckert´s reasoning is flawed, because...

But it would make a very strange impression if Irving had simply neclected to comment on Weckert´s proofs.

A further problem is that Irving doesn´t seem to be interested in finding out whether these parts of the diary have been forged. It would seem that he is more interested in simply telling us that that´s not the case.

I have not had time for looking into the new links that Reinhard presents, but obviously he has found one interesting contradiction in the passage, already posted, about the discovery of the diary.

driansmith wrote:I think it's important not to lose sight of the concern that the diary, as we have it, may contain a number of interpolated inauthentic passages. It would an extremely big step to assume that anyone thinks that the diaries are a fabrication lock, stock and barrel. I think fraud on that scale would have been discovered by now. Rather, the fact that the bulk of the diaries is authentic is important because it lends credibility to at least a half dozen passages which many people doubt were genuinely penned by Goebbels, and for good reason.

The question is how big this number is. I think we´re talking about much more than half a dozen.

When I read the diary, I noticed a lot of dubious passages. For example, Goebbels writes he has had dinner with "the Schaumburgs". The editor notes this is a mistake, the name of the couple is "Schaumburg-Lippe". It is of course possible that Goebbels has written this, and that he called this couple "the Schaumburgs". But I have the general feeling that there is an intention to present him in a bad way. I also have the feeling that the actual Goebbels would have written the names of his friends/colleagues correctly.

If just a few passages had been forged, then - considering the style of the forgeries that were desired -these would probably be too different from the rest of the diary.

It wouldn´t be a problem to write long forged entries. The tendency of the fraudsters is to lie in an unimaginable and incredible way. What goes for the Holocaust on the whole - people don´t assume that it could be a fraud because they consider it impossible - also goes for this diary. And let´s not forget that as much as 591 pages were orginally "found" by this obviously unreliable person (as it seems), Lochner.

A further problem is that Irving doesn´t seem to be interested in finding out whether these parts of the diary have been forged. It would seem that he is more interested in simply telling us that that´s not the case.

Not to get away from the content of the diary, but frankly, Irving seems to relish the glory of his 'discovery'. Anything that distracts from his sense of vanity seems irrelevant to him in this case, in my opinion.

Because this thread is so interesting I hastily compiled a chronology of the history of the Goebbels diaries from readily available sources on the Internet. I include comments and questions written from the viewpoint of someone who thinks the diaries are very substantially a hoax. Perhaps others interested in this thread might like to copy it and flesh it out with more details and add their own questions. For what it's worth - as I said, it was put together in a very short time - here it is.

THE GOEBBELS DIARIES: A SHORT CHRONOLOGY, WITH COMMENTS AND QUESTIONS

1941: March
At the end of March 1941 Goebbels had the 20 thick volumes of his diary deposited in an underground vault of the Reichsbank.

1941: July
Goebbels began dictating his diaries to secretary Dr Richard Otte.

Question: Is it not possible that there is a hoax, and that Goebbels never ceased writing his own diaries? Arthur Butz, Hoax of the Twentieth Century, has expressed doubt as to whether the story of how Otte transcribed the diary is true. See http://www.vho.org/GB/Books/thottc/10.html

1942 >
'While going through the Goebbels diaries [Irving] found that from about 1942 on Goebbels repeatedly said things like "We have crimes on our book. We can't go back. We can only go forward."' - Frank Miele.
http://www.skeptic.com/02.4.miele-holocaust.html#fire

Comment: No sooner does Goebbels stop handwriting his own diaries than they begin including passages in which G. betrays consciousness of being a 'criminal' - which is precisely the way the Allies were determined to depict him! How very obliging Herr Goebbels was!

Irving: The Germans filmed the diaries on about 1,700 glass plates in 1944 and 1945, some 70,000 pages of them.

1945: April: Late
The aluminium crates containing the microformed diaries were sent to the Führerbunker.

1945: July
According to Louis P. Lochner, the 591 typewrited original pages from Goebbels's diary were among 7,000 pages which had been discarded by the Soviets during searches of the Propaganda Ministry at Wilhelmsplatz. They had been found in the courtyard of the Ministry immediately after the end of the war by a rag collector, who took them to a waste paper dealer. Through the hands of different intermediaries, the papers came into the possession of American reporter Frank E. Mason. Mason suspected that they were Goebbels diaries and took them to Lochner, former chief of the Berlin bureau of the Associated Press. Lochner, who was definitely in Berlin in July 1945 - he was slightly injured in a crash with a Russian truck - subsequently identified them as the original diary entries of Dr. Goebbels. He did so on the basis of apparent similarities with Goebbels' 1925-26 diary, which had been given to former President Herbert Hoover during a visit to Germany in 1946. Lochner decided that they were genuine on account of rhetorical and stylistic similarities. Lochner edited and translated them into English himself. They were published in 1948.

Questions: Can we believe that the Soviet occupiers could not tell that the pages belonged to Goebbels's diary? After all the documents looked important: "The diaries were typed on fine water-marked paper, which was rare in wartime Germany and available only to high government officials." Next, can we believe that the Soviet occupiers allowed rag collectors to fossick among the ruins of the Propaganda Ministry? At this stage, they would have been searching diligently for material that could have been used to identify and punish suspected war criminals. Do we have anything, other than the word of two Americans - neither taken under oath - to prove the origin of the documents? Can the handwritten diary of 1925-26 really be used to authenticate the typewritten diaries of 1942-43? Could the typewritten diaries possibly have been faked by emulating the rhetoric and style of Goebbels's authentic 1925-26 diary?

There is an interesting connection here: Herbert Hoover. Not only did Hoover possess an authentic Goebbels diary, he was a close friend of Frank E. Mason:

"Mason's long friendship with Herbert Hoover, and the services he performed for the "Chief" as a public relations advisor and literary executor, are the principal focus of the papers Mason donated to the Hoover Presidential Library. Diaries and correspondence with Hoover and Mason's wife Ellen (1945-47) provide interesting observations concerning early Allied occupation policies. While he was in Europe Mason also acted as a collector of manuscripts, records and rare books for the Hoover Institution. His main coup was the discovery and preservation of a large portion of the diaries of Joseph Goebbels. This led to a prolonged fight with the Office of Alien Property which sought to block its publication by Mason and his associates."
http://www.ecommcode2.com/hoover/resear ... /mason.htm

More questions: Isn't it odd that Hoover's friend, Mason, is the man who told Lochner he thought the diaries were Goebbels's, and that Hoover had been given, by persons unknown (Mason?) the copy of a Goebbels diary that Lochner used to determine that the diaries Mason had given him were, in fact, those of Goebbels? Also intriguing: Why did the Office of Alien Property try to block publication of the Goebbels diary?

1946-47
Question: Why, if he deemed the diaries authentic, did Lochner not make them available for use during the Nuremberg trials, especially considering all the incriminating passages that appear in them from 1942 onwards?

1947
The pages of the Goebbels diary 'discovered' by Mason/Lochner were microfilmed in New York. The originals were then deposited at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California.

1948
Publication of The Goebbels Diaries 1942-43. 'When the Lochner Book came out in 1948 there was a note from the government that reads: "No representative of the interested agencies of the United States Government has read the original manuscript or the translation of excerpts therefrom. The Department of State desires, as a matter of policy, to encourage widespread publication of documents such as this purports to be, of significance in the field of foreign policy, and has therefore not objected to the publication. The United States Government ... neither warrants nor disclaims the authenticity of the manuscript upon which this publication is based, and neither approves nor disapproves of the translation, selection of material, annotation, or other editorial comment contained herein."

Questions: Was the publication of the diaries deliberately held over until the Nuremberg trials was over? Why did the US Government explicitly distance itself from the diaries? Wasn't it interested in knowing whether they were authentic or not? After all, if they were authentic they would have been extremely relevant to the ongoing war crimes trials. Was the US Government perhaps distancing itself from what it knew, or suspected, to be a hoax (if it was not actually involved in perpetrating it itself)?

1962
All available portions of the Goebbels diaries, including fragments unearthed by the French in their sector of Berlin, were microfilmed and published by the American Historical Association.

1969
The government of the GDR searched the ruins of the Reich Chancellery and found nine aluminium-boxes containing 20,000 severely water-damaged pages, both typewritten and handwritten, from the diaries.

Question: Is it really possible that as many as nine aluminium boxes were still sitting in the Reich Chancellery 44 years after the Fall of Berlin and (in particular) many years after the Soviets had destroyed the Chancellery and recycled the materials for the Treptower Park monument and other purposes?

1977
Hamburg publisher Verlag Hoffmann & Campe published the Goebbels diaries for the period February 28-April 10, 1945 from copies that had been unearthed in Central Germany.

1987
The greater part of the diaries covering the period 1924-41 - around 4,000 pages altogether, were published in four volumes by a former research assistant for David Irving, Elke Fröhlich of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich: Dr. Elke Fröhlich (ed.), 'Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels. Sämtliche Fragmente,' 4 Vols., Munich, KG. Saur Verlag, 1987.

1992: Early
Former research assistant for David Irving, Elke Froehlich, discovered the glass plates of the Goebbels diaries in the Soviet State Archives in Moscow because she recognised Richard Otte's writing on the lids. However, Froehlich's institute (the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich) denied her the means to research further.
http://www.codoh.com/graphics/goebdiaries.GIF

Questions: Can we really believe that the institute sponsoring Froehlich, who is supposedly the 'world's leading authority on the Goebbels diaries,' would not see the value of sponsoring important work on the Goebbels diaries? Why sponsor the research world's leading authority on the Goebbels diaries if you don't actually plan to enable her to carry out research on the same subject? Can we really believe that Froehlich was not at least a little tempted to research the diaries at her own expense? After all, she was in Moscow anyway. What's a hotel bill for a few more weeks?

Theory: Froehlich was sent to Moscow to 'pre-authenticate' the Goebbels diaries as the first stage of a trap to snare David Irving.

1992: June
After he was made aware of their existence by Froelich, David Irving becomes the first scholar to examine the glass plates of the Goebbels diaries. Miraculously, they authenticate the previously published Goebbels diaries (see entry for 1948), whose own story of origin is extremely implausible (see entry for 1945: April: Late). In particular, Irving uses the glass plates to decide the question of the authenticity of pages from Goebbels's diary that were 'wrangled over' in the Lipstadt trial.

Question: Could a fake have been perpetrated to 'prove' the authenticity of an earlier fake? Given the importance of the diary in polemics between revisionists and Holohoaxers like Lipstadt, it would be an extremely convenient way of bolstering the Holohoax position against the revisionists. Is this why David Irving ended up being enticed to Moscow by the discovery of the glass plates?

1992: July
Diaries found by David Irving in Moscow were first published by the news-magazine Der Spiegel in four issues, beginning with No. 29/1992 (13 July 1992) to No. 32/1992.

Comment: That's rather fast work! Irving has just obtained access to them, and within a month excerpts are already being published in a magazine that one would expect would be extremely wary of publishing this type of material.

Late 1992
David Irving successfully obtained the necessary funding to allow him to purchase the glass plates from the Moscow archives. No sooner did he raise the necessary cash than his access to the Moscow archives, and therefore to the plates, was abruptly cut off.

Question: Is it possible that 'they' (i.e., those actually running the Goebbels diary hoax) wanted Irving to know enough about the plates to authenticate them, but did not want him to actually possess them, in case over time he was able to work out that they were not authentic?

A further problem is that Irving doesn´t seem to be interested in finding out whether these parts of the diary have been forged. It would seem that he is more interested in simply telling us that that´s not the case.

Not to get away from the content of the diary, but frankly, Irving seems to relish the glory of his 'discovery'. Anything that distracts from his sense of vanity seems irrelevant to him in this case, in my opinion.

- Hannover

But does Irving in this letter really write like a man who thinks that he might have been wrong and doesn´t like it? Maybe, it´s possible. And maybe, on the other hand, he writes like a man who has a completely different, hidden, agenda; and a part of that agenda would be to convince people - Revisionists as well as non-Revisionists - that the diary is genuine.

And it´s interesting to see that Fröhlich is a "former research assistant" of David Irving. Fröhlich is also the person who, in a referred Spiegel article, seems to suggest that a comparison beteween the diary and articles/comments/essays by Goebbels shows "stylistical and grammatical" similarities. So, according to Fröhlich, one of the reasons we know the diary is genuine is that is resembles things actually written by Goebbels. Which in my opinion would be:

1. I agree with driansmith that the forgers probably had seized the genuine Goebbels diaries in 1945 (it wouldn't be possible to fake 70.000 pages and staying consistent with regard to locations, persons, meetings, etc.). But the huge authentic material would give credibility to the added fake passages.

2. There is one point in Ingrid Weckert's article, where she is obviously wrong:

In her comment on Goebbels' diary entry on November 10th, 1938 (“The condition of the [...] diplomat vom Rath still is very serious” [in the morning] and “in the afternoon, the death of the German diplomat [Ernst vom Rath] is reported”) she writes that vom Rath had already died the day before, Nov. 9th.

Weckert is aware of this characteristic habit of Goebbels, since she writes in her comments on the diary-entries of November 11th correctly: “All entries of November 11th refer to November 10th.”

3. A very interesting point in Weckert's argumentation is that according to Goebbels' secretary of state, Dr. Naumann, Goebbels and Naumann took the night express-train (departure 11:50 p.m. on Nov. 9th) to return to Berlin.
But according to the diary, Goebbels was in Munich during all day of November 10th.
It must be possible to find out where Goebbels actually was on Nov. 10th. If Naumann's version was true, this would prove the diary-entries of November 1938 to be fake.

4. But the decisive point here is that there is no original source for these entries: The original handwritten diary can't be found:

David Irving wrote:Unfortunately, nobody knows where the original volumes are.

Source: Irving, Introduction p. 10

In my opinion, this diary of 1938 is genuine. Since we haven't seen the original papers, we can't conduct the laboratory tests [...] which could confirm the result.

Source: Irving, Introduction p. 12

As Weckert points out correctly, the only authentic source would be the original handwritten diary of Goebbels. Or at least the glass plates of this diary. Both can't be found.

Irving worked from a soviet-made microfiche, which was labeled

David Irving wrote:Tagebücher für [sic!] Joseph Goebbels [Diaries for Joseph Goebbels] (the “for” is characteristic for all of these volumes) and vom 11. Februar bis 16. Oktober 1938 [from February 11th to October 16th 1938]

Source: Irving, Introduction p. 10

It is obvious that this volume can't have contained the entries from Nov. 8th to 11th, dealing with the Kristallnacht.
As Weckert mentions correctly, Irving doesn't explain in his introduction, where he has those entries of November 1938 from. In a letter from August 22nd, 1992 [to Weckert], Irving writes that the glass plates "for November" are unfortunately missing and only photocopies of decreased size in poor quality are available.

5. As to the entries from July 1941 on, when Goebbels had begun to dictate his diary-entries to his secretary Dr. Otte and had them had typewritten instead of writing it down himself in handwriting, the problem is even more serious:

For example this often quoted entry of March 27th, 1942:
It is based on that “finding” by that obscure rag collector, which was handed on to a waste paper dealer and then somehow ended up in the hands of Lochner.

Since we are told that Goebbels had taken the original typewritten pages with him to the Führerbunker, and instructed Otte to burn the carbon-copies of those typewritten pages in the Propaganda Ministry, we are expected to believe that the Soviets, who searched and examined all the German ministries very closely with their special forces (SMERSH, etc.) didn't come across and have a look at the carbon-copies of Goebbels' diaries, lying around in the courtyard of his Propaganda Ministry and that they hadn't prevented any unauthorized obscure rag collectors from entering the former German ministries and taking with them whatever they wanted.

This story is so incredibly stupid that I wonder how anyone could have believed it. It's a typical jewish story.

So the “source” for that diary-entry of March 27th, 1942 is a carbon copy of some typewritten document which was found by some obscure rag collector lying around in the courtyard of Goebbels' ministry, which the Soviets didn't care about and was presented by some (jewish, I presume) rag collectors and waste paper dealers to an US-journalist.

Where did Frank E. Mason get the pages of the alleged Goebbels diaries? We are generally given the impression that they came to him from local junk merchants. In fact, he found them at the American Document Center in Berlin-Zehlendorf, an institution set up in Berlin immediately after the war by the Department of State:

'they passed from Russian hands to American during the time when nearly everyone in Berlin was seeking something to barter. They ultimately ended up in the American Documentary [sic] Centre, where once again they were lost in a welter of unclassified papers until Mason discovered them.'

Source: Hamilton Spectator (Canada), March [9?] 1948.

In other words, the diary pages did not go directly to Mason but came to him via an American government institution, and there is nothing to say how they reached the Document Center.

The fact that the documents were found in an American goverment (State Department) institution also raises questions about why the US government did not hold onto them for use during the upcoming war crimes trials. Can we believe they just let Mason walk away with them?????

The same report states that Lochner identified the papers as those of Goebbels 'on translation.' That's odd in itself: can documents be authenticated on the basis of translated copies? It also states that Lochner authenticated them on the basis of 'internal evidence' - which means, for the uninitiated, that they weren't corroborated in any way. This means that Lochner decided that they were authentic because they sound like Goebbels, which is not a very sophisticated approach, because anyone fabricating the diaries would have made a decent effort to sound like Goebbels!

By the way, the Document Center still exists, or at least existed until very recently. According to one report, it holds many Gestapo records. However, most are sealed and access is extremely difficult:

In Dr. Wilhelm Stäglich's book The Auschwitz Trial. A Judge looks at the evidence (2nd edition, IHR, Costa Mesa 1990, pp. 85 - 89), I found the following passage:

Dr. Wilhelm Stäglich wrote:Therefore it may not be amiss to quote here a few of the diary passages in question from a relatively objective work, Heinrich Fraenkel and Roger Manvell's biography of Dr. Goebbels, which presents them in the sequence they were written.*Nothing could better show how little Dr. Goebbels knew about the treatment of the Jews. Whether Dr. Goebbels actually wrote these passages is, of course, debatable.Fraenkel and Manvell introduce these quotations with the following statement:That Goebbels was not only informed about every detail of the murder of millions of Jews, but also welcomed the establishment of extermination camps and even directly called for it, is proved by his diary.The reader must decide for himself whether that is true. Here are the quotations:[*= Dr. Staeglich cites the German edition of this work, which differs in a number of respects from the English-language original. For one thing, not all of the quotations cited there appear in the English version (I have taken the English text of these quotations from Louis P. Lochner's edition of the Goebbels diaries). For another thing, the account of the discovery of the Goebbels diaries is augmented in the German version of Fraenkel and Manvell's book. I thought it better to translate that longer and more specific account than simply to quote the corresponding passage in the English text. —T.F.]

March 27, 1942: … Beginning with Lublin, the Jews in the General Government are now being evacuated eastward. The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60 per cent of them will have to be liquidated whereas only about 40 per cent can be used for forced labour. The former Gauleiter of Vienna, who is to carry this measure through, is doing it with considerable circumspection and according to a method that does not attract too much attention. A judgement is being visited upon the Jews that, while barbaric, is fully deserved by them. The prophesy which the Führer made about them for having brought on a new world war is beginning to come true in a most terrible manner.One must not be sentimental in these matters. If we did not fight the Jews, they would destroy us. It's a life-and-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus…Fortunately a whole series of possibilities presents itself for us in wartime that would be denied us in peacetime. We shall have to profit by this…

The entry of March 27 is in such glaring contrast to the others that some doubt arises as to its authenticity. [...]

As we have pointed out, it is debatable that the pages from which these quotations were taken (dated January 21, 1942 to December 9, 1943) are authentic. On this matter, Langbein simply remarks that they were discovered in the ruins of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. He does not specify just where and by whom the diary was found. However, Fraenkel and Manvell relate the following story:

That these pages were rescued from the chaos of the fall of the Reich is due to chance. For his notes Goebbels used an unusually handsome and sturdy laid paper, such as the “average consumer” hardly ever got to see in those war years. After the capture of Berlin in 1945, some seven thousand sheets of this paper were lying around the courtyard of the Propaganda Ministry. Russian soldiers were about to bum these heaps of paper when a junk dealer, impressed by the quality of the hand-made paper, took the valuable and scarce commodity for himself, and thus saved the wartime memoirs of the Minister from the flames. Later, a great deal of effort was devoted to sorting and collating the scorched pages.In 1947-1948, Louis P. Lochner edited this material and published those portions of it that are of interest to the historian. The original manuscript reposes in the Stanford University Library in California, along with a copy of the Elberfeld Diary; a photocopy of the entire manuscript is to be found at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich. In those years, Goebbels no longer made his own entries in the diary, but dictated them to a co-worker, master stenographer Otte...Goebbels, by the way, never took the time to revise and polish his lengthy dictation once it appeared in Otte's neat typescript. That explains why the text is repetitious and stylistically uneven...

In many respects, this is a strange tale indeed. How are we to believe that Russian soldiers were about to burn unexamined documents from a Reich Ministry, but then decided-purely out of the goodness of their hearts, perhaps - to make a gift of them to a poor rag and bone man? It is strange, too, that a journalist “edited this material and published those portions of it that are of interest to the historian.” Fraenkel and Manvell do not reveal how Lochner gained access to these papers. No doubt he had some story prepared to explain that, but refrained from telling it, lest the whole business appear even more improbable. Naturally, the "original manuscript”- like so many other fragments of the German official files of that era - is in the United States, where the possibilities for manipulation were unlimited, not in an archive in Germany, where it belongs.In an evaluation he supplied the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel, Wilfred von Oven, the former adjutant of Dr. Goebbels, designated these scraps of the Reich Minister's diary as genuine. He based his opinion on the fact that they were written with a typewriter that had unusually large characters (nearly 1 cm high). Both Goebbels and Hitler used such a machine. Von Oven thought the content, style, and diction of the [91] pages of which he received photocopies (the entries of June 1943) fully corresponded to that in Dr. Goebbels' other writings.” [221] He was not provided with copies of the entries under consideration here, the most crucial of which may be the one dated March 27, 1942. In a personal letter to me, dated December 27, 1977, von Oven wrote that he would “most likely not have given such an endorsement” had he “known of these questionable passages,” and pointed out that it is possible to forge individual phrases and passages in typewritten documents. [222]In any case, the Goebbels quotations cited by Fraenkel and Manvell and by Langbein obviously do not help answer the basic question of our inquiry. If these authors seek to give the opposite impression, they are simply misleading us. Neither Auschwitz nor any other “extermination camp” is mentioned in these diaries.

[221] = See also Nation Europa, Nr. 4/1975, pp. 53ff. Langbein points out in the appendix to the aforementioned booklet that the Goebbels quotations used there are derived from the “diary,” of which “excerpts were published by Louis P. Lochner” (op. cit., p. 133).[222] = Interestingly, the Institut für Zeitgeschichte has admitted that passages could have been falsified. Before me is a communication on this which arose from an exchange of letters regarding the Goebbels diary. In the meantime, a Hamburg publishing house has published the first volume of a series of four of the so-called complete Goebbels diaries. I was not able to evaluate it for this particular study. Wilfred von Oven has identified them as falsifications. According to Oven, the authenticity of the citation from the Lochner edition, which also appears in this diary, can only be clarified by one of the three microfilms which Goebbels had made and had hidden in a secret place before he ordered his original diaries destroyed. None has yet been found. See von Oven, Finale Furioso, p. 647.